How to Restore Old Behavior of New Tab Page in Google Chrome, Disable Recently Visited Websites Thumbnails and Google Search

Recently Google released a new version of its web browser "Chrome" which comes with many improvements and fixes. One of these improvements is the redesigned "New Tab" page.

The new tab page in new version of Google Chrome contains a big Google logo along with Google search box. It also shows eight thumbnails of your recently or frequently visited websites.

Now many people might have problems with this new change as our readers "Matthew" and "Craig" are having. These two AskVG readers complained about the redesigned new tab page of Google Chrome. They don't want Google Chrome to show their frequently visited websites thumbnails on new tab page.

They asked for a solution to disable these websites thumbnails on new tab page of Google Chrome. So today in this tutorial, we are going to share a solution which will help you in restoring old behavior of Google Chrome's new tab page. It'll remove Google logo, search box and frequently visited websites thumbnails from new tab page.

If you also want to get the old "New Tab" page back in Google Chrome web browser, check out following simple steps:

1. You'll need to access the hidden secret "Chrome Flags" page to disable this new feature. Just type chrome://flags/ in addressbar of Google Chrome and press Enter.

2. It'll open Chrome flags page where you can disable/enable many advanced features. Press "Ctrl+F" keys together to launch find box and type following in the find box:

Enable Instant Extended API

It'll highlight an option with the same name.

Enable Instant Extended API Mac, Windows, Chrome OS
Enables the Instant Extended API which provides a deeper integration with your default search provider, including a renovated New Tab Page, extracting search query terms in the omnibox, a spruced-up omnibox dropdown and Instant previews of search results as you type in the omnibox. #enable-instant-extended-api

The value of the option "Enable Instant Extended API" would be set to "Default".

3. Click on the drop-down box and set its value to "Disabled".

4. At the end click on "Relaunch Now" button and once Google Chrome opens, you'll no longer see frequently websites thumbnails and Google search box in new tab page. You'll have the classic new tab page in Google Chrome.

Thanks to "MegaZone" at official Google Chrome forum for sharing this trick...

There is a way to get download resumption after the browser has been closed.Just checked the Flags page.Type Ctrl+F and type Enable Download Resumption=you will get that option.Enable and restart.Done!

Priyanka Jain

smart work. thanks for the tutorial.

SC

Thanks for your help. I almost switched to FF.

Ceyhan

a big thanks, also i think google should thank you too.

GF

Works! Thank You!

Adriana

And you just saved me life. Lost my theme that I had for 10 years but I'm glad to have this look back!

Kiran

Excellent , it is working now as i expected.

Bex

Brilliant, thanks

Jerzy

It no longer works in Chrome 33 :( But you can star the following bug if you want Google to provide a way to disable this new tab page: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=326788

Very easy to fix. Set BING as your search engine and the logo does not appear any more. Someone at Google will probably not be getting a bonus for this.

It seems the designers who created the METRO disaster for Microsoft have moved to Google now.

mhwg

!!! I hate them !!!!!!!

For new CH33

I found some option. Change yours default search engine for omnibox in settings to BING for example, and GOOGLE disappears, after that just enlarge the view size to 125%-150% for new tab only and thats all.